Ep232 Stay off the Field

In this short episode, David Wheatley revisits the classic “quarterback to coach” transition. Many leaders are promoted for being great doers, then struggle to step back and let others take the field. David shares a memorable story from manufacturing, practical cues for staying out of the weeds, and a simple mantra for every new leader: stay off the field and build capacity. A great listen for anyone learning to lead at a higher level.

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Transcript

David Wheatley – Humanergy (00:10)
Welcome to this episode. I’m your host, David Wheatley, and this is a short one, but it’s a call back to episode 18 of this podcast. In that episode, I talked to Scott McFarlane from Honor Credit Union, who was also a football, American football, player and a football coach. I wanted to talk to him about the idea of going from quarterback to coach.

This is something I see all the time. Someone gets promoted because they’re a great quarterback, and their next job is actually to become the coach. Scott and I talk about it extensively in episode 18, but I wanted to come back to it because I’m seeing it more and more. Someone steps into a new job and the temptation is to keep doing parts, if not all, of the last job because, after all, you were the best person at it. The difficulty is staying off the field.

So if I’m the coach now and no longer the quarterback, I might still be the best quarterback on the team. But I have to give space for the new quarterback to start playing, learning, succeeding, and potentially becoming better than I am. That requires me to stay off the field and set the parameters. If you search any of our episodes for “delegation,” that will help you define what’s on the field, let the quarterback know what’s going on, absolutely give coaching advice, but stay off the field. Leave them to actually do it. Leave them to own it.

This mantra of “stay off the field” when you’ve moved into a new role is one a number of my clients have started writing on a Post-it note and sticking next to their screen at work. There are so many doing that that I thought it was worth a reprise of this idea.

It works at any level. It doesn’t matter where I’m at. If I just got promoted, I’ve basically gone from being the quarterback to the coach, and I need to stay off that field.

One example: I was working with a senior vice president in an engineering organization in manufacturing. I noticed he was wearing jeans and what looked like a tour T-shirt from a country band or something. I asked, “Is that how you normally come to work?” And he said, “Yeah. I’ve ruined so many shirts because I always get oil on them.”

My challenge to him was, “Why are you putting your hands in a machine?” He said, “People don’t know how to fix it. I’ve been working with these for a long time, so I always end up getting in there and getting covered in grease and oil.”

So we had this conversation about what his role was and what it shouldn’t be, that he’s now the coach and not the quarterback. I even said, as difficult as it may be, start wearing your shirts to work, the nice shirts with the collars. Now you physically have to unbutton the cuffs and roll them up before you start. And every time you do that, I want you to think about whether you should even be rolling your sleeves up, or whether someone else should be the one in that machine, in that oil. You should be the one standing there asking the great questions that empower and enable them.

A few months later, he reported that he’d only ruined one shirt and was more routinely going to work in a nice pair of trousers and a shirt, letting his folks get on with operating the machine. He would be the one saying, “What do you think? What are you seeing? What do you think you should try next?” That was the coaching role, even though it would have been quicker for him to jump in and fix it. The fact that they were learning how to fix it, and coming up with great ideas about how to do it, meant he was building critical thinking and capacity.

So that’s this week’s mantra: stay off the field, build capacity. We’ll talk to you next time.